Exit through the gift shop

Friends Fest is a celebration of the TV show but the experience is really a series of queues leading you to places to take photos on recreated sets from the series: in Monica’s apartment, at the Central Perk coffee shop, on the sofa of the title sequence or on the La-Z-Boys in Joey and Chandler’s place. There are lot of interesting opportunities but there is also a lot of standing in line. There’s food and a bar as well as a big screen showing classic clips. Occasionally there is some interaction on the main stage but because no wants to miss any of the selfie opportunities, when we were there, everybody wanted to stand in a queue to get their next picture and not watch the stage show. There’s a system to take COVID safe pictures - with decent lighting - which you subsequently collect on a website. You get reasonably good photos and I think we have some fun ones but I can’t help believe that there’s an opportunity to make something more of it. If you took out a measure, you’d probably calculate that there’s not much real social distancing because everybody is always in a queue - albeit properly masked up when inside - but it was also nicely controlled. I guess anything more interactive isn’t really possible now but I wonder what it would have been like without these unprecedented times.

On the way out there is a gift shop. Any sign that says ‘exit through the gift shop’ makes me and PY laugh quite a lot and, therefore, a photograph had to be taken. As I write this, I can’t remember the origin of our joke. I know that the 2010 Bansky documentary is not it.